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Sweden has its fair share of weird folkloric fauna. When studying the maps and literary works of 16th-century Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus, one might think that Scandinavia was completely monster-infested. Magnus’s seminal work Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (History of the Northern People), printed in Rome in 1555, contains detailed, but wildly imaginative, information about the zoology of Sweden.
The reader is treated to vivid descriptions of dwarves warring with cranes, sea serpents devouring ships and dancing, satyr-like fairies. His Carta Marina from 1539 shows maps of Scandinavia where the waters are teeming with monsters that look like refugees from a Godzilla movie.
For any Scandinavian, those crocodilian monsters look utterly out of place in the northern climate. Sweden, though beautiful, can hardly be considered a suitable stomping-ground for large reptiles. To the far north are desolate mountains, in the south Tolkienesque, Shire-like landscapes, and in between dense woodland of pine and spruce. It’s all well and good speculating about prehistoric monsters in far-away Congo swamps; it’s not so easy to picture them stalking the pinewoods.
Still, it is in such woods that tales of the dragon and its kin have flourished. To those who dwelt within the forest, it was a world of wonders and terrors, full of magical creatures to be fought with magical means. The Swedish dragon, though reptilian in appearance, had a supernatural rather than natural origin.
It was said that when a greedy old miser hid away the inheritance due his relatives, his soul would leave his body at the moment of death and take the form of a scaly, serpent-like monster to guard the hoard. Said dragon would on occasion leave its treasure and soar across the sky in the shape of an elongated, flame-encircled object, thus making a novel transition from mystery beast to UFO. No knights or heroes were called upon to challenge such a creature, but rather the nearest priest, who would exorcise the monster with prayer.
Such supernatural creatures need no appropriate ecology to exist, just human contact. The dragon was therefore no more out of place in the Swedish landscape than ghosts, werewolves and trolls. But there were others of a supposedly more mundane origin. Most lake monsters were considered abnormalities of nature – prehistoric relics, giant fish or hybrids of wildly different species. (How does the horned, finned lovechild of a bull and a pike grab you?) But even such beasts were subject to the laws of the Church; just as in the story of St Columba subduing the Loch Ness monster, many of Nessie’s Swedish relatives were tamed by clergymen.
Among the monsters supposedly native to Sweden, one stands out from the crowd: the lindorm, or “lime tree serpent”, named for its habit of laying its eggs under the bark of the lime tree. Tales of the lindorm are predominately found in the south of the country, particularly in the regions of Småland and Blekinge.
A typical lindorm tale is similar to an account of encountering a large snake in the jungle. Someone is out walking, stumbles on the big reptile and flees. Sometimes there is a violent confrontation and the monster is overcome. That’s it. There’s no moral to the story, no allegory or witty twist. It would appear that what you’re reading (or hearing) is a retelling of an actual event. The lindorm cannot fly or breathe fire and doesn’t have any magical powers. It’s simply a very big, nasty reptile. It is, however, equipped with a potent venom and a curious method of locomotion. But more about that later.
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